Individuals needing assistance or support with an application have few options. They can place a call to a support phone line and speak with a technician, enter search queries into a search engine, or use electronic assistance. Collaborative screen sharing can help resolve issues by sharing a customer's screen with a remote customer service representative. Similarly, collaborative browsing, or co-browsing, can allow a customer and a customer service representative to navigate a web site collaboratively. However, these screen sharing systems can require large amounts of computing resources. For example, large amounts of information associated with the shared screen are often exchanged over the network, straining network communication resources. These screen sharing systems can also burden customers' individual computers during the screen sharing session while screen or web browser contents are transmitted to the customer service representative, adversely affecting performance of the customer's computer. In addition to requiring computing resources, screen share or co-browse systems can require high levels of attention from customer service representatives. That is, with screen share or co-browse systems, customer service representatives are focused on an individual customer, and thereby limited in the number of customers they can assist at a time.
Additionally, collaborative screen share and co-browsing environments can raise privacy concerns. Basic screen share applications allow the customer service representative to view everything on the customer's screen. Other screen share applications allow the customer to specify an individual application such as a web browser to share while keeping private the customer's other applications. However, even when the screen share applications focus on an individual application, the customer may not want to share certain information such as a social security number or credit card number. Still more advanced co-browse environments may allow customers or administrators to mask individual fields. However, the customer must remember that the masking feature exists and use the feature, or the administrator must configure the application or the co-browse session to perform the masking.
An object of this invention is to provide improved systems, apparatus, methods, and computer-readable media for digital data processing. A more particular object is to provide improved systems, apparatus, methods, and computer-readable media for selectively sharing UI elements for collaborative application usage.